With strong quarter growth, Facebook hits over 1 bn users

New York: With a strong revenue and profit growth, social networking giant Facebook has added 60 million monthly users in the second quarter of 2016 to reach 1.71 billion users while scoring $6.44 billion in revenue – blowing the earlier estimates of $6.02 billion.

Its social network operation raked in $2.05 billion in profit compared to $719 million a year ago.

Wall Street on Thursday reacted to the positive earnings with a 7.5 per cent surge in Facebook’s shares ($132 per share) in after-hours trading.

While daily active users (DAUs) were 1.13 billion on average for June – an increase of 17 per cent year-over-year, mobile DAUs were 1.03 billion on average for the same month – an increase of 22 per cent year-over-year.

Monthly active users were 1.71 billion – an increase of 15 per cent year-over-year and mobile MAUs were 1.57 billion – an increase of 20 per cent year-over-year.

This is Facebook’s 16th best out of 17 quarters since it went public at $38 per share, Tech Crunch reported.

“Our community and business had another good quarter. We’re particularly pleased with our progress in video as we move towards a world where video is at the heart of all our services,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO, said in a statement.

Facebook now sees two billion searches per day, up from 1.5 billion a year ago.

According to Zuckerberg, people searching for what others are saying about certain topics is driving that growth, which highlights Facebook’s on-going quest to win public chatter – as space Twitter has long ruled. However, Facebook doesn’t plan to rush to monetize search.

“Revenue generated from mobile ads jumped 80 per cent in the second quarter, faster than Facebook’s overall 59 per cent advertising growth rate,” it added.

The average revenue per user is now $3.82, up 15 per cent from last quarter.

One billion people are now using Facebook Messenger every month. Messenger is now the second-most popular iOS app of all time, behind Facebook.

Facebook-owned Instagram has now reached 500 million users.

Earlier, although it added three million users — one million more that what analysts had expected — the not-so-promising second quarter earnings results led to the shares of micro-blogging website Twitter tumbling this week which wiped out nearly 10 per cent from its share price in after-market trading.

The company posted quarterly revenue of $602 million, up 20 per cent year-over-year and reported $107 million GAAP net loss ($0.15 per share) with quarterly non-GAAP net income of $93 million ($0.13 per share).

A year ago, the year-over-year growth was 61 per cent and two years back, it was a whooping 124 per cent.